It’s not that I don’t clean the toilet. I do clean the toilet.
But the seat and lid are not ready for royalty. And your basic cleansers don’t seem to have much effect. Plastic don’t shine up like porcelain do. It’s not horrible, but there’s always something suspicious about yellowish stains. It looks like the last day of a bruise, and I want it gone. So I youtubed it.
Before youtube, if you had to fix something, you had to have personal lore passed down to you and you also had to remember it. Unfortunately the ubiquity of immediate information has rendered my memory-bone vestigial. Every hack I’ve ever looked up, I’ve looked up more than once. As long as there are still enough pixels to replace my neurons, I’m good to go.
I have a preference for written steps, but I’ll click on a video if it’s short enough. There is a good way to make instructional videos, but unfortunately any damn fool can hang out a virtual shingle and publish a video.
The kind that make you want to hire a hit man start out “Hi! I’m Carl Spindlemeister from Carl Spindlemeister’s Happy Handyman. Today we’re going to learn what to do if your toilet won’t flush. There’s nothing worse than when you’ve got the boys coming over for poker and all of a sudden, whoops! Your toilet won’t flush. Yuck! There it is, a big mess creeping up the bowl, and you’re all, Is it going to stop in time? and you still have to make the bean dip and stock the fridge! Let’s get going, okay?”
Okay!
The screen goes blank and then there’s CARL SPINDLEMEISTER’S HAPPY HANDYMAN in a bad font for a half a minute. Thirty seconds of staring into space feels fine, but the same thirty seconds going nowhere in a tutorial and you can feel your life shortening. Carl comes back eventually and gets going on his project but there’s a lot of parenthetical blather happening. He’s got anecdotes and he can’t talk and work at the same time.
What you want is more like those snappy cooking videos. Someone has already done the mise en place and all you see is a bowl, someone pouring in one clearly-captioned item after another (TWO TBS SALT boom ONE CUP FLOUR boom TWO POUNDS GROUND MOOSE RECTUM boom) and possibly a few extra seconds devoted to demonstrating something like mango-whacking, and Voi the heck Là. Dinner in under a minute.
So when it came to whitening my toilet seat I was looking for written instructions. Preferably something so concise it fits in the search engine results page. Ah! Almost all the suggestions involved baking soda and/or vinegar. Sounds like there is a consensus. I clicked on “Three different methods for cleaning a toilet seat.”
How often do you get embarrassed by the color of your urine-stained toilet seat? Because the toilet is one of the most patronized areas of a home, it’s not surprising to see the seat discolored. Stained toilet seat is more pronounced in a home with little kids below the age of 13 because these children do not really understand the effort it takes to keep a toilet seat sparkling.
Below the age of 13 and the height of three feet, I would add, and also? The hell. They’re sparkling all over that seat. But I digress. It went on.
Why take the time to keep your toilet seat sparkling?
That age-old question was good for another five hundred words. We’re scrolling hard, now. Carl Spindlemeister? You here?
Stained toilet seats, it says, are “an eyesore that you may find hard to ignore with time. This might prompt you to replace the seat without any cracks on it.”
Well, that’s the problem with toilet seats. All the cracks on it.
Honestly, what I’m looking for in a help site is how to do the thing. Not why I want to do the thing. I already want to do the thing or I wouldn’t have clicked here.
Then there is a list of TWELVE THINGS you should have on hand to clean your toilet seat. Twelve! Baking soda bathroom cleaner bleach bucket old toothbrush paper towel rubber glove sanitary wipe toilet brush sponge toilet cleaner towel and vinegar.
They forgot whiskey.
I can’t bail out now. Surely the instruction part is coming right up. Let’s see:
Before we proceed, you need to gather the tools and items you will need for this task. To prevent calling out for a particular bleach or scrub, gather every item you need and ensure they are within arm’s reach, perhaps you can have them organized in a handy bucket.
Helpful! This dude could do two pages on hanging up your jacket. Ah: Step one is to make a paste from baking soda and vinegar. Step two is apply paste, scrub, rinse, towel-dry. Steps three through five are exactly the same as step two.
Or you could try the vinegar method. Step one, I swear, is “Get a bottle of distilled white vinegar from the local market or an online store.” Damn! It doesn’t just drop out of the sky? I didn’t look at the other six steps in case they involved setting an alarm to get an early start, making sure your car is running properly, bringing a reuseable bag, and flossing.
I also declined to look at the Coca-Cola method. It might work, but I’d never enjoy an ice cream float again.
That’s why, when I watch a YouTube video, I click on the settings, then click on playback speed, then boost it to 1.25 or sometimes even 1.5 speed if they are really droning on. And glide my cursor over the timeline to locate where they are actually doing something. I, too, prefer written instructions, as I can read faster than most people on these videos talk. And yeah… if there are several videos on the subject, I always choose the one that’s the briefest.
Oh…ouch. That meat tenderizer hammer reminded me, again, of the week after my one and only colonoscopy.
One and only because you’re not due yet? Prepping, the procedure and the aftermath are a pain in the tuchus, but the consequences of not going though all that, well you know. I just lost a friend who didn’t like going to the doctor and as far as we know never had a colonoscopy until he had a stroke. And then they ran every procedure known and discovered he had advanced cancer all through his body and it had probably started in his colon.
Odd that. Paul had a colonoscopy recently, and the worst part about it was the prep. Don’t eat. Don’t drink alcohol (that was especially harsh.) Don’t vape pot. He was perfectly fine after leaving the building. Didn’t even walk funny. (Or at least, any funnier than he already walks.)
The prep sucks. Although it isn’t as elaborate as it used to be. Just clear liquids and an overdose of Miralax.
They actually gave Paul a print-out of various parts of his colon. It was a very attractive colon, as colons go. I told him that he should laminate the pictures and keep them on him. Then, when someone brings out their smart phone and says, “You’ve gotta see this picture!” then proceeds to spend a couple minutes trying to find it, he can whip out his colon pics and say, “While your scrolling, here’s my colon! Isn’t it a beaut!
Carolyn, look what you started!
GOOD! People need to know that the drugs don’t erase everything about the experience!!
It wasn’t the prep (although that night was a nightmare unto itself, also forever etched in my mind). It was the raw flesh that had to heal during the week after the prep that has stayed in my memory all these years.
Bruce: “one and only” because I’m never doing it again until Science can find a way to make it less barbaric. I don’t foresee that happening in my lifetime, and if I drop dead from cancer I think that’s probably a better ending than going through a decade of Alzheimers.
Not that I have issues….
I remember reading somewhere that France doesn’t automatically prescribe colonoscopies as they are invasive procedures. They test the poop for hidden blood.
Since we don’t have socialized medicine here in the USA, it’s very profitable for the doctors and the insurance companies to run frequent tests on people.
Kaiser insisted on colonoscopies when we turned fifty but thereafter sent the poop sample kits in the mail.
My first one without anesthetic, just an ineffective tranquilizer. Fortunately the policy at the HMO has changed since then. Three cheers for Propofol!
Carolyn, you shouldn’t have any after effects at all, other than hunger. Maybe get a new practitioner. I always wonder if they really did it. Saved my son’s life…
I particularly hate the online recipes. You have to wade through pages and pages of filler to get anywhere close to the ingredients. I usually give up and call one of my cooking buddies or try to figure it out on my own.
Usually they have a “button” where it says “skip to the recipe.” That’s what I click on. I don’t need instruction in cooking. Just a new recipe.
Voi the heck La!
Entertaining as always (I use a little Comet and a couple wet paper towels) but I was hoping for something a little less cranky and more Christmasey! Happy Holidays, Murr :^)
Ya gets what ya gets.
I, for one, am GLAD it wasn’t Christmasy. We don’t celebrate the “holidays” and have it rammed down our throats from Thanksgiving to New Years. The Christmas songs have been playing so constantly that I can’t put on my usual jazz streaming, and all radio stations (even news radio) is all about the holidays. I even suggested to Paul that it would be great to have at least one station with the catchy title of Jazz for Jews (even though we’re atheists, not Jewish.) It would be all the regular jazz, but with NO Christmas songs. Maybe once in a while, a jazz version of the dreidel song, or Hava Nagila. (which actually exist! I was curious and googled them. The dreidel song was hilarious! It was not only jazz, but big band jazz. And the singer wore a plush menorah on his head instead of a santa hat.)
While I was still working, the planner for the division’s Christmas lunch came to ask the only two Jews she knew if we wanted to suggest any Chanukah music to play during the event. We two Jews agreed that Chanukah music, like most Christmas music, is not very good and we’d rather hear jazz. Much to our surprise, that — jazz — was what was played. It was great.
Oh, god, I LOVE jazz! Little did I know when I was little, but my mom was listening to jazz: Nat Cole, Mel Tormé, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett. At the time, I just thought of it as “old people’s music.” Now, I have it streaming all the time (except at Christmas. Then I have to rely on my old trusty CDs.
My parents had one big band album they never listened to — Tommy Dorsey, maybe? — the rest of their albums were classical and folk. Then one day they brought home Brubeck’s “Time Out” album, and my brother and I were hooked.
I totally concur on videos! They are so frustrating. I’m a visual learner. I can see the recipe and it goes directly into my brain. I don’t need someone showing me all the steps. (Of course I’m also careless when I read and sometimes I realize I skipped a step. Oh well, it usually doesn’t matter anyway unless it’s baking). You know why these things are all so long is because they want to fit more ads in. It’s like those stupid clickbait story things where they drag on incessantly (and the denouement is never worth the wait).
Search Engine Optimization, keywords, scrolling activity for ad exposure, and of course, stupid. The reason it’s so frustrating trying to learn online what’s there to be learned is money and stupid. Feel free to apply that formula to most things American. And recipes? I’m beginning to suspect the more animated pop-up ads on the page, the less likely it is the recipe is any good. They all seem to either copy each other outright (This is my dear old Granny’s Top Secret recipe for Persimmon Pudding. Ssshhh!), or they change one tiny thing from someone else’s site (6.5 tsp of wtf instead of 2.3 Tablespoons, for example.) From there it works like the telephone game until the pudding tastes like chicken. I thought I had it figured out how to go from a cooking page with 25 pics and enough ads to trigger a migraine to a clear printed recipe in just a few clicks, but most sites have overcome that hack. What a world.
“Dinner in under a minute” unless you count the hours pf prep work that went on before the camera was turned on.
Your plastic toilet seat might not be stained but simply yellowed with age. That’s what white plastic does. The once white trim on my white refrigerator is now a nice shade of cream and will get darker over the years. As long as the fridge still does its job, I don’t care.
If the seat really is stained, I suggest taking the whole thing off and placing into a bathtub half full of hot water with a half bottle of bleach added and leaving it there for several hours. After you drain the bath, and rinse off the seat, and the tub and dry both, you get the bonus of a sparkling bathtub too.
Not the worst idea. Although I suspect this is an aging thing.
My 90-year old uncle stopped by for lunch the other day and mentioned he is writing a book with all the helpful hints. Great idea! He shared one from his childhood. He happened on his father who was kneeling in the bathtub which was full of water, and he had a caulking tube, and he was wearing only his underpants. So far so good. Father then explained that in order to apply caulk that would get the job done, he filled up the tub and added his own weight so that the tub would depress ever so slightly, as it would in normal use, exposing the cracks in the old caulk so that they could be re-caulked and Voi the heck Là!
Oooo! I heard something similar back when I took evening adult education courses (back before YouTube, so they no longer have these classes.) It was a home repair course, and they said to fill the tub with water… but they neglected to mention the part where you actually get INTO the tub to do it… in your underwear. i think that’s a much better touch! Thanks for the imagery.
That is very cool, Susan! I ain’t doing it! And actually, the imagery isn’t the selling point, is it? Now we have Susan’s aged uncle’s father on all fours with the drawers on. Nuh-uh.
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute. You take out the old caulk first, old man.
I have never been able to apply a decent-looking bead of caulk. Unsteady finger, perhaps. Now I call professionals.
I have to weigh in… I suspect any advice that calls for a teaspoon or a tbsp of bleach of vinegar etc…. Seems like we have always had stains that require and 24 hour soak of the nearly straight stuff… bleach usually. Even my vinegar water mixture in the spray bottle leaves everything smelling like a large salad. Don’t even get me started on my snail spray.